WORKSHOP: Doctoral Consortium at the 2017 International Conference of Mobile Brain ­Body Imaging (MoBI) and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to provide partial support for the 2017 International Conference of Mobile Brain-Body Imaging (MoBI) and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity. The conference's goal is to identify the challenges and opportunities for engaging the creative arts to promote novel and innovative approaches for solving complex problems in science, engineering, education and medicine. The meeting, to be held at Hotel Arenas, Valencia, Spain on September 10-13, 2017, is being jointly co-organized by the PI (University of Houston) and Prof. Jose Azorin (University Miguel Hernandez de Elche, Spain). The agenda is designed to promote audience-driven critical discussions on the state of the art, and to facilitate art-science collaborations. To these ends, the conference will adhere to a single track format with thematic sessions that are jointly chaired by a scientist/engineer and an artist, with no more than 4 speakers per session. Interactive demonstrations, a brain-computer interface hackathon, and Art-Sci performances that address grand challenges will add to the conference's broad impact. A special issue of the journal Brain-Computer Interfaces will promote wide dissemination of findings from the conference presentations and hackathon designs. The Doctoral Consortium will consist of several intertwined activities that will provide an opportunity for the trainees to network while exploring and developing their research interests within the context of an interdisciplinary conference, under the guidance of a distinguished group of international researchers, artists and innovators. To assure diversity, the organizers will actively recruit student participants from under-represented groups, including women and minorities, with a maximum of two students per institution (and if two then one must be a female). Doctoral consortium trainees will be divided into multidisciplinary teams to serve as scribes (one team/conference session) that will report back to the participants at the end of the conference, thus promoting both written and oral skills. Each team, in collaboration with two faculty mentors, will draft a manuscript to be published in an edited book on Artistic BCI Systems, and they will also compete in the BCI Hackathon which is sponsored by the IEEE Brain Initiative with the goal of fostering innovation in the field. Additionally, trainees will each prepare a poster about their graduate/postdoctoral research, to obtain feedback from faculty and peers.